Many consumer electronic devices could benefit from a directional microphone that filters out sounds coming from outside a relatively narrow listening zone. Although such directional microphones are available they tend to be either bulky or expensive or both. Consequently such directional microphones are unsuitable for applications in consumer electronics.
Microphone arrays are often used to provide beam-forming for either noise reduction or echo-position, or both, by detecting the sound source direction or location. A typical microphone array has two or more microphones in fixed positions relative to each other with adjacent microphones separated by a known geometry, e.g., a known distance and/or known layout of the microphones. Depending on the orientation of the array, a sound originating from a source remote from the microphone array can arrive at different microphones at different times. Differences in time of arrival at different microphones in the array can be used to derive information about the direction or location of the source. Conventional microphone direction detection techniques analyze the correlation between signals from different microphones to determine the direction to the location of the source. Although effective, this technique is computationally intensive and is not robust. Such drawbacks make such techniques unsuitable for use in hand-held devices and consumer electronic applications, such as video game controllers.
Thus, there is a need in the art, for microphone array technique that overcomes the above disadvantages.